Christchurch earthquake: Power restored to 82 percent of customers

Only a few customers would be left without power in the coming week with electricity having been restored to 82 percent of households, lines company Orion said today.

"As of this morning we had restored power to 82 percent of customers and over the next seven days, we are aiming to get the power back on to 95 percent of customers," company chief executive officer Roger Sutton said.

Some customers would be without power owing to property damage, with parts of the CBD still off limits for electricity cable work.

Mr Sutton said the 95 percent target was going to be a real stretch, and unforeseen disruptions, further aftershocks or altered Civil Defence priorities etc might prevent the company from achieving it.

"However, we are doing our best to achieve our target.

"Some 36,000 customers are still without power and these include small pockets across the city where there are significant faults."

The fragile nature of the network meant there would inevitably be unexpected outages from time to time in areas already reconnected, Mr Sutton said.